Saturday, March 21, 2009

Google's spy in the streets triggers a wave of protests

Sorry for the lull here.

Guardian: "For 24 hours, Google's new Street View brought a vision of British cities to the web that included such memorable sights as a man throwing up between his knees outside a London bar and youths with traffic cones on their heads in Edinburgh.

But while the chance to take a 360-degree tour of every street in 25 UK cities continued to bring most offices to a standstill yesterday, some of the more invasive moments caught on camera saw Google hit with a wave of privacy complaints"

If you read the article there's very little real protest. I'm not going to say I've never used this. And it's quite cool and all. I just don't like Google's culture of 'filling in the gaps' aka ostensibly 'If it can be done let's just do it', it creates this care-free atmosphere of zero-consequences that contributes massively to this surveillance culture.

It's as if Google see it as their sole responsibility to push back the boundaries of privacy more and more to the point that it really doesn't exist anymore. And it's developed a firm track record of this, which is very difficult to deny, with Gmail and Google Health, its search records and various other greedy guzzling initiatives which I think are demeaning, trivialising and sinister.